Directed by: Christopher Nolan
Starring: John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Kenneth Branagh, Michael Caine
No need to worry. There will be no spoilers revealed in this review of Christopher Nolan's Tenet. I am not champing at the bit to let the cat out of the bag. I feel stupid saying this, but Tenet is nearly indecipherable. It makes Inception look as transparent and as easy to follow as a children's book. The more the movie attempts to explain itself, the more confused we become. I can explain the bare bones of the plot to you, but anything deeper you're on your own.
John David Washington (from BlackkKlansman) stars as The Protagonist. Why does he not have a name? It is one of Tenet's many mysteries, but not a fatal one. After a laborious setup involving a rescue of a powerful man when a Kiev ballet performance is invaded by terrorists, The Protagonist is selected for another mission: To stop World War III. Okay, but how? Well, not in the traditional way. The Protagonist is taken to a lab where "inverted objects" exist, such as a bullet shot from a gun which can fly backwards in time instead of forward. So, in theory, you can shoot someone in the past without actually having to travel in time to do so. (I think). This isn't just done with bullets, it can be done with a nuclear weapon also.
The Protagonist tracks, with relative ease, the arms to a villainous arms dealer named Andrei (Branagh), who is threatening the world's destruction by sending the weapon back in time to destroy life in the past, thus destroying life in the present. It's explained as The Grandfather Complex, the paradox in which if you kill your grandfather in the past, you will cease to exist as well. The Protagonist, who is teamed up with a partner who knows more than he lets on (Pattinson), must stop the nuclear bomb from exploding in the past, and kill Andrei in the present. He gets help from Andrei's wife Kat (Debicki), whom Andrei blackmails into staying with him by threatening to prevent her from seeing her son. This is supposed to be the emotional tug which pulls the story along, like Cobb's mission to see his own children in Inception, but it seems tacked on and without much heart.
Tenet is bursting at the seams with chases, crashes, explosions, and then stopping to explain why all this happening and how. This would normally be a positive and allow us to regain our footing, but the explications may as well have been spoken in Klingon. We only sink further down the rabbit hole of muddled plot twists, as characters occupy the present as well as the past, and obliterating the laws of physics in the process. A little confusion is okay, and with a relatively normal movie, seeing where we were bamboozled is part of the fun. Tenet, with all of its action sequences and visuals, is not fun but a slog.
Tenet, like all Christopher Nolan movies, is a superior production in terms of visual splendor. The actors are to be applauded for the great effort they inject into characters who exist at the service of an all but incomprehensible plot. Tenet is too much concept and too little of just about everything else.
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